At Sandy’s sensational announcement there was a stampede from the bridge. Soon after Dick and Larry raced through the cluttered and deserted dining saloon, it was invaded by the captain, the millionaire, Miss Serena and others, with Sandy in the lead.
“What did you discover, Dick?”
At Sandy’s cry his chum, as well as the oldest Sky Patrol, turned.
“Nothing!” said Dick.
He made a disgusted gesture toward the open front of the refrigerating box, to the four ice cube trays lying empty on the galley floor.
“They were as empty as our heads!” Larry was dispirited.
“Sure they were!” the chef, who had observed their invasion of his cookery compartment with amazement, spoke up. “I had to use all of ’em to freeze the cubes for your dinner. No use to fill ’em again till I wash ’em up, so I left ’em out while I ‘defrost’ the box—cut off the current and let the box get warm enough to melt the frost that collects when you freeze a lot of cubes.”
He indicated the refrigerating unit which had heavy ice clinging wherever the chill had congealed the moisture from the evaporation of the water.
“Any other trays?” Mr. Everdail snapped.
“Only them, sir.” The chef threw all the compartments wide.
Food, ice-drip trays and vegetables in their dry-air receptacles, were all they discovered by a painstaking search. A glance into the “hydrator” packed with vegetables, crisp lettuce, long endive, and other varieties, a foray behind and under everything satisfied them that another clue had “gone West”—and left them very much out of favor.
No matter how closely they examined the built-in box, with its glossy enamel and bright, aluminum trays, nothing except food and drinkables in bottles revealed themselves.
And that ended it!
“I thought that was how it would turn out,” Jeff, coming from the after deck, declared.
“I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” the yacht owner grumbled. “I ought to have known better than to trust three young men under seventeen to solve such a mystery.”
He reflected for a moment and then spoke his final word.
“I think I shall land you at a Brooklyn wharf, boys, and let you go home.”
“See what Friday, the thirteenth, does for you?” Jeff said.
Neither of the chums had a word to answer.
“The date has nothing to do with it,” Mr. Everdail snapped. “It’s their lack of self-control and experience.” He turned and stalked out of the galley and after him, sorry for the three members of the disbanded Sky Patrol, Jeff moved.
“Sorry, buddies,” he said, shaking hands at the pier to which the yacht tied up briefly. “Don’t let it stand between your coming out to that-there new airport once in awhile to see me. I guess if Atley is through with you he’ll be done with my crate too, so maybe we’ll meet up one of these days soon. If we do, and I have the money for gas and oil, Larry, you get some more flying instruction. You may not be a crackerjack detective, but when it comes to handling that-there crate, you rate mighty good.”
He said a pleasant word to each of the other two, added a friendly clap on the arm and, with Mr. Everdail saying a brief, if not very angry farewell, the Sky Patrol quit its service, finished its air work and took to its feet.
Explanations at home accounted for the termination of their stay, which had been arranged by telephone at the beginning; and it seemed to them that the Everdail Emerald mystery was, as Dick dolefully said, “a closed book without any last pages.”
So despondent was Larry at his failure as a sleuth that he did not like to discuss their adventures with his chums.
His depression was more because his air training was over than from a real sense of failure. To Larry, one only failed when one failed to do his best—and that he had not failed in.
As a week went by Dick saw something to laugh about in their wild theories, their almost fantastic deductions. He found an old stenographers’ note book and jotted down, in ludicrous terms, the many clues and suspicious incidents they had encountered.
But Sandy was really glum.
To Sandy, the fault for their dismal failure lay at his own door.
“If I hadn’t gone off ‘half-cocked’,” he told his comrades, “maybe we would have seen something or somebody really worth following up.”
He made a vigorous mental resolve never to be caught in such a trap again.
That very afternoon he passed a news stand and was chained in his tracks by a small headline in black type at one corner of a paper, in a “box,” or enclosure of ruled lines that set it off from the other news.
“Take a look at this!” he hailed Larry as the latter sat on Dick’s porch, whittling on the tiny struts of a model airplane.
Both chums read the box he thrust under their eyes.
“Ghost Again Walks In Haunted Hangar.”
Under that heading the story reminded readers that the Everdail estate had been haunted several weeks before according to report.
The millionaire, it went on, coming East to meet his wife, returning on their yacht from Europe, had investigated the uncanny events reported to him by his caretaker and others.
He had learned nothing, the reporter had gleaned from the caretaker of the deserted estate.
However, it ended, as soon as Mr. Everdail had sailed on the yacht to join his wife at their lakeside camp in Maine, uncanny light, odd noises and other strange things had become evident again, as an excited local correspondent had notified the paper. Reporters, searching, and watching, had found nothing so far but the public would be informed as soon as they discovered the secret.
“What do you think of that?” Larry looked up.
“I don’t know what to think,” Dick admitted. “No ghost does those things. A real person has some reason for doing them. Who? And why?”
“The only way we’ll find out is by going there, at night, and watching,” Larry declared.
“Not for me,” Sandy said, surprising his chums. “We were ‘kicked out’ once. If we were to be caught on the place we’d be trespassers—and if the clever news reporters are watching and don’t find anything, how can we?”
“I’m going to be too busy earning money to finish my flying lessons to bother, anyway,” Larry decided.
“Still—” Dick began, and then, looking down the street, he became alert.
“Larry! Sandy! Look who’s coming. That’s the man who flew in the ‘phib’ with Mr. Everdail—the day the yacht came in!”
“It is!” agreed Larry. “He’s coming here. I wonder what for!”
“Hello, boys. Remember me?”
Dick rose to meet the man, tall, quiet, and with a smile of greeting on his face that belied the creases of worry around his eyes.
“I ought to,” Larry also advanced, rather sheepishly. “I tackled you the day you floated the dory out to the cracked-up seaplane.”
“Oh, no hard feelings, my friend,” the man shook hands. “You wrenched a shoulder that was already pretty painful—but you thought you had a jewel robber to deal with, so let’s let bygones sleep.”
He shook hands and accepted the lounging chair Dick offered.
“I don’t believe I’ve introduced myself,” the man began. “I’m Mr. Whiteside. Of course you wonder what I am here for.”
Naturally they did. Each nodded.
“I’ve kept pretty well in the background of this case,” he told them. “I am, by profession, an official of Mr. Everdail’s eastern enterprises. But I consider myself something of an amateur detective ‘on the side’ and I want you three to help me.”
“But Mr. Everdail ‘discharged’ us.” There was no resentment, only remonstrance, in Larry’s quiet remark.
“Oh, I know it. I have seen him, been up in Maine. But he has given me a free hand, and I think you three can be useful. You see, I want that hangar watched, now that the reporters have gone away. I can’t be there day and night—I know,” he broke off to explain, “that you three have suspected me of having something to do with the wrong side of the affair, and naturally enough. I came upon Larry unawares, at the seaplane. I accepted his offer about surrendering jewels and actually had a gun in my hand at the time. No wonder I fall in line as—well, as a suspected person. I don’t hold that against you. As it happens, I am trying to recover the missing jewels, just because I made such a failure of rescuing them before.”
That might, or might not be true, Sandy reflected; but he maintained a careful guard over expression and speech.
“We aren’t doing anything about the mystery,” stated Sandy, wondering if that might be the plan—that this man had come to try to pump news out of them. If so, Sandy was determined that as long as they had given up, been given up, it did not matter if the man knew it or not.
“But you will do something! To help me out?”
“What?” Dick asked, with a mental reservation as to any promise.
“Why, go out to the Everdail estate, under my direction, and watch.”
“We’d be trespassers,” argued Sandy. “We might be arrested.”
“I can arrange all that.”
Mr. Whiteside turned directly to Larry.
“I need you for something else,” he said. “Atley Everdail isn’t here to help, if any situation developed where I would need a pilot. I have a theory that makes me think I shall need one——”
“What about Tommy Larsen?”
The man who had piloted the cracked-up seaplane was again able to fly, he responded, but was not safe for a long flight. Besides, the detective argued, he wanted someone who had proved himself trustworthy in more things than flying.
“I’ve had only about nine hours instruction,” Larry said honestly. “I wouldn’t like to risk soloing on that. I can taxi, handle the ’plane to get into the wind, take off and fly level, bank, turn, circle, spiral, climb, shoot the field and set down. But——”
“That is all settled in advance,” Mr. Whiteside stated. “Tommy Larsen is ‘kicking around’ without a job. I’ve got his consent to finish your instruction, and put you in trim for a license by the end of Summer.”
Sandy, watching his friend’s face take on an eager light, a look of longing, decided that Mr. Whiteside could not have found a more certain way to fascinate Larry and enlist his cooperation.
Dick, too, showed an interested face.
“That would be great!” Larry declared. Then he became more serious, adding. “Finishing up my course would be fine, but if it means that I’d have to do anything against Mr. Everdail’s wishes, after he told us——”
“He wishes to recover those emeralds, my boy.”
“But he has agreed with Miss Serena that they are destroyed,” Dick objected.
“And I think they are not destroyed!”
He gave them his theory.
“When Everdail gave me all the facts he had about the London attempt to ruin the emeralds, the first idea I had was that some independent robber had failed to find the real gems and, in spite, had damaged the imitations.”
“But no other jewels were taken!”
That supported his decision that neither a single robber nor a band of miscreants had planned the affair. They would have taken all the real stones, and he believed that these were numerous.
“I weighed the situation,” went on the detective. “A robber would be enough of a gem expert to know the stones were imitations and would have taken the others. But—some Hindu fanatic, in India, where the emeralds came from originally, might have a fixed idea that they must be destroyed. He might not know imitations from real ones.”
“That would explain why acid was put on them,” agreed Dick. “It wouldn’t explain any other attempts, though.”
“No! I argued that as soon as a Hindu accomplished the entry to the hotel and believed he had destroyed the stones, he would stop.”
“Then why did you and Mr. Everdail fly out to meet the yacht?”
“We wanted to take every precaution, Larry. There was a chance that no Hindu was involved. It might be someone with what the French call an idee fixee—a fixed notion—a demented purpose of destroying emeralds—no other stones were treated with acid except those lying in the little pool around the emeralds.”
“Are there people as crazy as that? And going around, loose?”
“Once in awhile you hear of such people, Dick.”
“Well, wouldn’t anybody in England give up then?” asked Larry.
“Anybody who remained in England would have to—he’d be left there. But—” Mr. Whiteside leaned forward and spoke meaningly, “—a man sailed from England—and although I did not know it at the time, I have checked up, since, and the man from London is an English circus acrobat—who went in for ‘stunting’ on airplanes.”
“The man who claimed to be a secret agent of a London insurance firm?” asked Dick, amazed.
“The firm sent no investigator!”
“Then we have found the man who is guilty!” exclaimed Dick. “He was with Tommy Larsen, hired him to go out to meet the yacht!”
“That seems to be the fact,” Mr. Whiteside admitted. “Before the arrival of the yacht I had no inkling that this fellow had come over; but Mrs. Everdail was so nervous and worried, we decided to fly out to meet the yacht, just as Jeff, who had been retained before Everdail found me, decided to do.”
Sandy had made no contribution to the discussion.
He spoke, at last, quietly.
“I said, early in the adventure, that nothing was what it seemed to be,” Sandy remarked. “This backs me up. But——”
“But—what?”
“Look at this, Mr. Whiteside—we are sure he made a try for the emeralds in the seaplane he hired. He thought they were destroyed—at least he had done all he could to destroy them. Then—why did he make another try?”
“Maybe he wasn’t sure he’d done what he intended,” argued Dick.
“He had ruined them! Wasn’t that enough?”
“My idea is that he learned—there was an accomplice on the yacht——”
“Mimi?”
“Perhaps! He must have learned that the real gems were not ruined at all,” Mr. Whiteside explained.
“Do you think his confederate threw the real ones overboard, in the life preserver, with the ruined imitations tied to it?”
Turning to answer Larry, the detective hesitated.
“That doesn’t check up,” he said. “The confederate—Mimi—knew the imitations! She wouldn’t throw them at all. If she knew the real ones were hidden in that life belt she’d have flung that. But we know that the imitations went overside and were in the gum—as Sandy cleverly discovered. So—that makes it all muddled up again!”
“I don’t understand how the haunted hangar comes in,” protested Larry.
“That’s what I want to discover. It does come in—I’m sure of that! You, and Dick and Sandy, can help, I believe. Two to watch the hangar, taking turns, and with my aid whenever I can manage it. You, Larry, to perfect your flying technique and be ready if I need you.”
“It sounds good to me!” urged Larry, turning to his chums.
“Well, I say, let’s reorganize,” Dick had a twinkle in his eye. “You, Larry, will be the sole member of the Sky Patrol—and Sandy and I will be—er—the ‘ground crew’!”
“That’s a good description,” the detective chuckled.
“All right,” agreed Sandy. “Dick, you and I are the ground crew. As soon as you’re ready, Mr. Whiteside, we’ll take hold!”
Taking hold, for the “ground crew,” required some argument with parents. Mr. Whiteside seemed to have some magical way of overcoming objections to possible night activity, however; and the next morning found the two reinstated assistants riding with Mr. Whiteside on a ’bus bound for the town nearest to the old Everdail estate.
Their morning work consisted of investigating the hangar, outside and inside.
The caretaker raised no objections. He seemed entirely satisfied that Mr. Whiteside was exactly what he claimed to be, and so Dick, who had held some misgivings, accepted the man as a detective and worked with a will to discover some clue to the means used by the “ghost” for getting in and out of the hangar.
In that the trio failed, and had to give up until night would let them return and establish a keen guard over the haunted structure.
Larry fared much better.
He found Tommy Larsen much improved in health, with his nerves again steady.
“I don’t feel uneasy about short hops,” the pilot informed him. “I don’t think I’d want to take a long control job just yet, though. Now let’s see what Jeff put into you. Before I go up with you, tell me what you’d do if you were really starting off alone.”
“First of all,” Larry said, “I’d go over to the weather display board, to see what the flying conditions would be.”
“You did learn!” Tommy was pleased. “Yep! That’s important. Then——”
“I’d notice the windsock, while I’d go to my crate. If it wasn’t already running, I’d start the engine—being sure to repeat every syllable of the ‘mech’s’ words when he turned the prop.”
“You wouldn’t want any mistake on your part to have the juice on when he swung that prop to suck in the charge—good!”
“Of course, if the airplane was on a cement apron in front of the hangar, it would be all right to start the engine there. But in sandy ground, or on a dusty apron, I’d be sure the tail wasn’t pointed so the propeller blast would throw dust on ’planes or on people.”
Pilot Tommy Larsen nodded vigorously.
“Don’t intend to be a dusting pilot, do you?”
“No, sir. Then I’d warm up the engine—by granny-golly-gracious! I forgot something——”
“What?”
“Well, unless I’d seen him do it, before even the engine was started, I’d want to be sure the ‘rigger’ of my crew would go over the crate and wipe it with a soft rag, so any frayed wires would be noticed—and I’d want to be sure he had inspected the ’plane either when it landed last or before I’d take off.”
“Jeff was a good teacher, I see. Go ahead.”
Larry went through the explanation of his method of taxiing, with the elevators up enough to keep the tail on the ground as he used the throttle to regulate speed, and the ailerons to govern the wings and keep them from being tipped up or down by wind or uneven ground, as well as his idea of using the rudder to hold the ship on its straight travel to the point of take-off and how he would turn.
“All right! If you know all that about getting set, you might as well let me see you do it!” Thus Larry began his tenth hour of instruction.
That completed, and with a quiet compliment for the way he had made his final check of the engine and instruments while the chocks were still under the wheels, with a word of advice about not trying to lift the ship off the ground in a cross-wind until a safe margin of speed was assured, Larsen bade him return that afternoon. Larry, pleased, went to his lunch, turning over in his mind the many things he had done, to see if he had done any of them in the wrong way.
“I corrected the tendency of the wind to turn the crate as we taxied, and I lifted her off and leveled for a couple of seconds so that the prop could bring back flying speed before climbing.”
He had also chosen a moderate climbing angle, keeping a watch for any incoming craft as he went higher before banking and turning.
“I remembered to return the controls to neutral when I had the ship flying just the way I wanted it to,” he mused. “And I didn’t over-control. Maybe—maybe it won’t be long before Tommy will let me solo.” It wasn’t!
At three that afternoon Larsen informed him that he was to take up the dual-control craft they had hired from a flying friend of the pilot’s at Roosevelt Field the second, on Long Island.
“All right—thank you. I’ll keep cool—and do my best.”
He walked to the airplane, standing before its hangar, determined to use the after seat, as did most pilots flying alone in a dual machine, and turned to Tommy inquiringly.
“Where’s the sack of sand?”
“Did you think of that?”
“Yes, sir. If I am in the front and you are in the other place, and the airplane balances and flies easily, there must be something to make up the difference when you aren’t along!”
“Bud—you’ll get along!”
And when the sack had provided stability in the front place, Larry, feeling a little anxious, but more about making mistakes under the pilot’s watchful eye in starting than about his performance in the air, got the engine started, warmed up, checked, put the craft into the wind, signaled for chocks to be pulled away, gave a spurt of the “gun” to start it, accelerated speed till the ship began to want to take the air itself, having remembered to use the elevators to lift the tail skid free from dragging—and with a return of elevators to normal right away to keep the craft level on its run—he drew back on the stick, widened the throttle feed a trifle, returned the elevators to normal as he attained the safe climbing angle, and was up and away on his first solo flight.
In his whole life he had never felt such a sense of elation!
The whole fifteen minutes that he stayed up were like moments of freedom—alone, master of his craft, able to control it as he would—there is not, in the whole world, another sensation to equal that of the first solo flight of a youthful pilot who combines confidence in himself with knowledge of his ’plane and how it responds.
The heavens were his!
No bird ever was more free.
And when he made his landing, perfectly setting down on wheels and tail-skid as Jeff had taught him, “I wish all my pupils were like him,” said a flying instructor who had been watching. Larry, doffing his tight “crash” helmet, overheard.
It was the most cherished compliment he could wish.
And that marked the beginning of ten days of flying, sometimes with Tommy to give him the evolutions of recovering from side-slips, skids, tail spins, and other possibilities of flying, none of them hazards at sensible altitude, and with a calm mind guiding the controls. At other times “stunts” were taught, not to make him a daredevil, but because, in flying, an airplane sometimes gets into positions where the pilot must know every possible means of extricating it. Solo, and with Tommy, Larry became a good pilot.
And in all that time, his “ground crew”—got nowhere!
“Hooray!” Dick slapped Sandy’s shoulder. “The ‘man higher up’ has come down to earth! Here comes Larry!”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes!” Sandy exclaimed as the youthful amateur pilot joined his friends.
“I haven’t seen much of you, I know.” Larry sat down on the swing by Dick on the latter’s veranda. “Daytimes I’ve been studying rigging and checking up on an airplane, because Tommy thinks a pilot ought to know everything there is to know about his ship because he may have to do things himself if he gets hold of a careless rigger.”
“If the pilot didn’t know the right way he couldn’t say if his helper was doing things the wrong way,” agreed Sandy.
“But that hasn’t kept you away evenings,” objected Dick.
“Tommy has been very good to me, giving me his time, in his room, so he could tell me all the ‘fine points’ he has picked up about flying.”
“Sky Patrol’s report received, considered and accepted,” Dick stated.
“Now for yours,” Larry smiled. “What has the Ground Crew done?”
“Watched, evenings, turn and turn about, till midnight,” Dick told him. “Mr. Whiteside took the day shift and came on to relieve us every midnight.”
“What progress have you made?”
“None at all!”
Sandy, responding to Larry, added:
“But you wouldn’t expect anything to happen if you’d seen all the reporters who have been ‘hanging around’ the old estate. Why, one has slept in that hangar a couple of nights.”
“No ghost with any self-respect would make a show of himself for newspaper publicity!” Dick chuckled.
“Almost all we needed to do was to watch the reporters,” Sandy said. “But they have given up, I guess. There was only one out last night, and he told me he thought the paper that ran that ‘box’ had played a trick on the others and on the readers.”
“That’s good,” Larry remarked. “Now the coast will be clear, the ghost can walk, and I will be with my trusty comrades to trip him up.”
“It seems queer to me,” Dick spoke. “I’ve thought a lot about it. The fellow who played ghost must be searching for something. What can it be?”
“The emeralds?”
“But he was there before they were lost, Dick,” Larry objected.
“That’s so, Larry.”
“Here’s something that just came to me.” Sandy bent forward in the lounging chair. “Nothing has happened at night, for ten days. But all that time, Mr. Whiteside has been on the ‘day watch,’ as he calls it.”
“Golly-gracious!” Larry exclaimed. “Do you think?——”
“When Jeff flew us there, the first time, there seemed to be somebody in that hangar when we started in,” Dick added to Sandy’s idea.
“You’re right,” Sandy admitted. “By the way, Jeff is back at Bennett Field, taking up passengers for hire again.”
“I’m not worrying about Jeff.” Larry was caught by the suspicious action of their “detective” in taking the day watch while nothing occurred at night.
“What do you think of going out there to the hangar now?” he asked.
They thought very well of the idea.
It was close to noon when the ’bus deposited them at the town from which they had to walk to the estate.
Strolling down the quiet street toward the main highway, Sandy’s alert eyes, always roving, caught sight of the estate caretaker. They hailed him and ran to the corner where he had turned to wave to them.
He greeted them sourly. Plainly the caretaker was out of sorts.
“Humph!” he grunted. “More dern amachoor detectives!”
“What makes you say that?” Sandy’s grin of salutation changed to a look of hurt surprise.
“Why wouldn’t I say it? Ain’t it enough I had reporters an’ all rampagin’ through the place without you three got to come, on top o’ that Whiteside feller and Jeff——”
“Mr. Whiteside—and Jeff?” repeated Larry.
“Yep! Nights it’s been bad enough—now it’s daytimes! Ghosts! Reporters! Snoopers! And now you fellers in the daytime!”
“What about Mr. Whiteside—and Jeff?” Dick wanted to get to the bottom of a startling situation.
“Well, if you must know—that Whiteside feller was there, as per usual, and along come Jeff, limpin’——”
“Limping? Was he hurt?”
“Had his foot tied up, Master Larry. Said he was flyin’ and his power quit and he had to come down in a bad spot and a lot more.”
Once started on his troubles and their cause, the caretaker needed no more prompting. Jeff, he went on, had met Mr. Whiteside and said that if he wanted to fly he’d have to go in that other thing that they put in the water——”
“The hydroplane boat?” Sandy broke in to ask.
“No, the ampibbian——”
“The amphibian!”
The man nodded as they walked down toward the highway. After he helped the others to get the water-and-land ’plane onto the field, he grumbled, and had turned the propeller blades till his arms ached, the superstitious pilot, saying he had stumbled and fallen that morning and knew something would go wrong, had decided that they had no time to repair or find the trouble in the amphibian.
They must get going, he reported that Mr. Whiteside had declared, and Jeff had argued that if he had a six-B slotted bolt, he could fix his motor.
“I never did hear of a six-B slotted bolt—or any slotted bolt,” declared Dick, while Sandy and Larry assented.
“Neither did the hardware man here in town after that Whiteside feller gave me five dollars to walk in the four miles and—back!”
Dick consulted his comrades with his eyes.
“That sounds to me like sending a new machine shop hand to the foreman for a left-handed monkey wrench,” he chuckled. “They’ve played a joke——”
“That doesn’t fit in,” argued Larry. “A bandaged foot, a limping pilot, an engine that wouldn’t start—and sending this gentleman on an errand that would take him away for a good while——”
“Where did Jeff say he set down?”
The caretaker turned and scowled at Sandy.
“He never set down nowhere. He leaned against the hangar!”
“I mean—where is his own airplane?”
“He never told me.”
All three comrades wished heartily that Jeff had revealed the information. Since he had not, each cudgeled his brains for some likely place within walking distance of the estate.
“That ‘six-B slotted bolt’ makes me think his engine hasn’t anything wrong with it at all,” Larry stated, finally. “Furthermore, I think he put down his crate in some handy—good—spot!”
“A crackerjack pilot like Jeff could get in on a pretty small field,” Larry argued. “One place I can think of that isn’t a bad landing spot is the fairway of the ninth hole on that golf course yonder.” He indicated the grounds of a golf club. “It’s away from everything, and he might fly over the course, see that no foursome or twosome was likely to get there for some time—” Dick nodded, agreeing; but Sandy shook his head.
“What bothers me,” he stated, “is that if his engine is all right, Mr. Whiteside would have met him and gone in Jeff’s ship.”
“Unless—unless they wanted to make a water landing!”
“Golly-gracious, Dick! I think you’ve found the reason——”
“But, Larry—why wouldn’t they use the hydroplane boat?” Sandy was not convinced.
“I think the amphibian would be quicker—and maybe they don’t want to land but need the pontoons in case of——”
Dick, laying a hand on Larry’s arm, stopped him.
“I have guessed the answer,” he cried. “They wanted to get rid of this gentleman,” he nodded toward the caretaker. “Then they could search that hangar——”
But they, themselves, had done that thoroughly! Larry made the objection but Dick waved a hand to dismiss it.
“The ghost hadn’t found anything. We hadn’t!” he argued. “Maybe they’ve decided there is something—and if it isn’t there when they make a good search, they think they know where else to look—and it’s either in the water—or over the water—or——”
“In the swamp where the seaplane crashed!” shouted Sandy, complimenting Dick with a sound smack on his back.
“Then let’s look on that fairway and see if the airplane is there, and if the engine runs.”
The airplane was there. The engine operated readily.
While they discussed these proofs of Dick’s quick wit, the sound of an airplane engine turned all eyes skyward.
“It’s the ‘phib’!” Sandy exclaimed.
“Come on—get in!” Larry urged. “I can fly this crate—and we’ll see what they’re going to do!”
If he never did so again, Sandy lived up to his decision to turn over a new leaf for once.
Usually impulsive, generally quick to adopt any new suspicion, he surprised his chums by catching Larry by the coat and dragging him back to the ground as his foot rested on the wing-step bracing.
“No!” he cried. “No! Larry—Dick—you, Mister! Come on, quick—under these trees yonder!”
They stared at him.
“Don’t you understand?” he urged. “Jeff will fly over his crate to see if it’s all right. He may see us. Come on!”
So sound was his argument that the others hurried with him to the concealment of the nearby grove, after Larry had thoughtfully cut out the ignition so that the propeller would not revolve if its observers flew low enough to distinguish its position.
Well hidden, they learned how wise Sandy had been.
Coming closer as it dropped lower, the amphibian circled in a tight swing over the fairway several times and finally straightened out, flying toward the wind that came from almost due North on this first cool day after a humid July week, and began to grow smaller to the watchers.
“We’d better get that engine started, now.” Dick left the grove.
“Let’s be careful,” commented Sandy. “They may come back.”
“We can be warming it up and watching!” Larry urged.
“We don’t need to hurry,” Sandy insisted. “I think I know—at last!—what this all means.”
Three voices, that of the caretaker no longer grumpy, urged him to explain. Too earnest to be proud of his deductions, Sandy spoke.
“When the hangar was first haunted, and we found chewing gum that the ghost had put there, as we thought,” he told an interested trio, “none of us could work out any answer to the puzzle.
“But stop and think of these things,” he continued, urging his two friends to use their own imaginations. “The amphibian was old-looking and didn’t seem to be much good, and the gas gauge was broken, and the chewing gum was quite fresh. That might look as though——”
“Some pilot was getting the ‘phib’ ready to fly and chewed gum as he worked and put the gauge out of order to keep anybody from knowing he had filled the gas tanks.”
“Good guess, Larry! It’s the way I work it out,” Dick added.
“Go on, young feller.” The caretaker was absorbed.
“Well,” Sandy grinned, “the chewing gum disappeared! Supposing the fellow we thought we saw vanishing really was there and got out some way. He’d know, from Jeff landing us and our going in, that the amphibian might not be usable when he’d need it——”
“So he went back and got the gum—but why?”
“He was getting that ready, Dick, for the emeralds—remember how Sandy discovered the place the imitations were hidden?”
“That’s so, Larry. Go on, Sandy. You’ve got a brilliant brain!”
“Oh, no,” Sandy protested. “It just flashed over me—putting all the facts together, the way I made up my mind I’d do.”
He outlined the rest of his inference.
“That was proved—the seaplane coming out to the yacht proved that the passenger who said he was a London agent, and wasn’t at all, had changed his plans. Well, say that he had arranged with Mimi, Mrs. Everdail’s maid, to have her throw over the jewels——”
“But she wouldn’t make the mistake of giving a confederate the wrong ones. She’d seen the real ones.”
They were working on the check-up and warming of the engine as they talked. Dick made the objection to Sandy’s theory.
“She’d know that the man knew the difference too!” Larry added.
That could be true, Sandy admitted. But he argued that the girl must have seen the captain take the stern life preserver to his cabin, and might have guessed, even observed through a cabin port, what he did. In that case she would have thrown over the life preserver knowing that her confederate would put it in the seaplane. And he had done exactly that!
“But the passenger jumped with a different life preserver!” Dick was more anxious to prove every step of Sandy’s argument than to find flaws in it.
“I think we found the life preserver that they might have had on board the seaplane all the time. And the other one—we never thought of the yacht’s name being painted on its own things. So we took it for granted that we had the real hiding place.”
“You argue real good, young feller.”
“Thank you, sir. Well, if that was true—and if it wasn’t—why is the ghost walking again in the very hangar that the seaplane wreckage is in?”
That was a clinching statement.
“You’re right. And the passenger, who has been out of sight, has been haunting the hangar, trying to find the other life belt,” Larry took up the theory. “Mr. Whiteside must have guessed that, too, and he planned today to make a good search and if he didn’t find what he wanted——”
“He’d fly over that swamp and see if the other belt had fallen out of the seaplane—and he’d need a pilot—so he got Jeff!” Dick put the finishing touch to the revelation. “Larry kept Tommy busy, so Mr. Whiteside got Jeff.”
“Then we ought to be flying—the engine wasn’t very cold—it’s safe to hop.” Larry took a step toward the airplane.
“I still claim we needn’t hurry,” Sandy argued. “If we go too soon, they will be sure to see us and give up.”
“But they may find the life preserver if it’s still there and get away with the emeralds.”
“If it’s still there, Larry, it will take some hunting. Anyway, we almost know their plans. If they don’t find anything they will come back to the hangar with the crate. If they do——”
“They may go anywhere,” Dick declared.
“Well, I don’t say not to follow them. But I do say let’s take our time. Isn’t there some way we can work out so they won’t be likely to discover us?”
Larry stared. Then he nodded and grew very thoughtful.
At last he delivered a suggestion that met unanimous approval.
The airplane, with a more powerful engine and better flying qualities, could go higher than the amphibian which was both slower and more clumsy. To that argument he added the information that if the binoculars they had first used were still where Dick had put them, in the airplane pocket, they could find the ship’s “ceiling”—the highest point to which power would take it and the air could still sustain it at flying speed—and from that height, in one look downward discover the truth or falsity of their theory.
“If the ‘phib’ is flying low over the marsh, we can go off as far as we can and still see it,” he finished. “Then if they fly back to the hangar, we can outfly them on a different side of the island and get here in time to leave Jeff’s crate while we go and see what they do. They won’t suspect that we’re near, and if the caretaker goes with us as a witness to check up our story and to help balance the fourth seat, we can either come back if they do or follow them if they go somewhere else.”
Within half an hour, high in air, the airplane found its quarry!
With a cry of delight, unheard in the engine drone, Dick took the powerful glasses from his eyes, passed them to Sandy and then rubbed his hands vigorously to rid them of the chill of the high altitude.
Sandy had only to take one look when he located the object of their flight, to know that his deductions had all been sound.
Close to the grassy, channel-divided marsh, flying in a sort of spiral to cover every bit of ground, the amphibian was moving.
Sandy generously recollected the caretaker and sent back the glass.
Larry, informed by Sandy’s gesture of the discovery, nodded, took a second to jam his cap tighter, glad that it fitted so close that it could partly save his hair from the blasting, pulling wind—he had no helmet!—banked and leveled off into a course that would take them straight away from the locality.
“I don’t want them to catch us cruising,” he murmured to himself.
After a short flight he came around in a wide swing, so that the airplane was over the Sound and then crossed the marsh again from that direction.
The report he got was that the amphibian was still flying.
But the next approach told a new development.
The ’plane beneath them had set down!
That caused Larry to determine to circle over the place. They had found something, perhaps, down below!
When Sandy waved in an excited gesture, twenty minutes later, and Larry’s keen eyes saw the amphibian, a tiny dot, moving over the Sound, he felt sure that the missing life preserver had been found.
Taking a quick glance at gas gauge, altimeter, tachometer and his other instruments, he nodded.
“All right,” he told himself. “We’ll follow them and see what they do and where they go.”
On high wings the pursuit began.
Judged by the theory they had worked out, the action of the men in the amphibian indicated that they were flying away with something they had found.
“If they had given up, so soon,” Dick mused, holding his head low to avoid the icy blast of their high position, “if they’d given up Jeff would go straight to the hangar again. But they’re going across Long Island Sound toward Connecticut, just as the unknown person in the hydroplane boat did with the other life preserver.”
Larry, holding speed at a safe flying margin so that the sustentation, or lifting power of the air, was greater than the drag of the airplane as it resisted the airflow, let the nose drop a trifle, let the engine rev down as he glided to a lower level where the air would not bite so much. They would be able to follow quite as well, dropping behind just enough to keep the line of distance between them as great as if they were higher and closer over the amphibian.
With his glasses, Dick could observe and indicate any change of direction or any other maneuver.
They had devised a hastily planned code of signals, very much like those used by a flying school instructor giving orders to a pupil where the Gossport helmet was not worn.
Dick, watchful and alert, lowered his chilled glasses and Sandy, keeping watch, saw his right arm extend straight out from his shoulder, laterally to the airplane’s course.
Sandy repeated the gesture after attracting Larry’s attention by a slight shaking of the dual-control rudder which was still attached, but which, on any other occasion, he had been careful not to touch.
“Left arm extended! Turn that way!” Larry murmured.
Gently he moved the stick to lower the left aileron, bringing up the right one, of course, by their mutual operation; rudder went left a trifle and in a safe, forty-five degree bank, he began to turn.
Almost instantly Dick again removed the chilly glasses, stuck his arm out ahead of him with his forearm and hand elevated, and motioned forward with the wrist and hand.
The signal was relayed by Sandy.
“Resume straight flight.”
Larry, getting the message correctly, reversed control, brought the airplane back to straight, level position on the new angle, and held it steady, revving up his engine and lifting the nose in a climb as Sandy gave him Dick’s sign, hand pointed straight upward, to climb.
“What in the world are they going to do?” he wondered.
“Have they discovered us?” Dick pondered the possibility.
“I can’t guess this one,” Sandy muttered. “They started to turn one way, then went on only a little off the old course, and now they’re coming up toward where we are.”
The problem was not answered, either by the continued gain in elevation or by the later change of plan.
“They’re gliding!”
Dick, as he made the exclamation, gestured with his arm toward the earth.
To Sandy’s signal Larry cut the gun, keeping the throttle open just enough to be sure the engine, in that chill air, would not stall, and with stick sent forward and then returned to neutral, imitated the gentle glide of the amphibian.
What it meant none of the three knew any better than did the half frozen caretaker who wished very sincerely that he had never come.
“Sandy! Sandy!” Dick cried as loudly as he could. “They’ve done a sharp turn—they’re going back home I think!”
Larry did not need to have the intricate signal relayed, nor did he wait to be told his passengers’ deduction. Their own maneuvers had given him a clue.
With the first change of direction and the following indecision that showed in the amphibian’s shifts of direction, Larry spelled a change of plan on the part of its occupants. The resulting glide, enabling his chums to speak above the idling noise of the engine, indicated a similar possibility in the other ship—Jeff and Mr. Whiteside were talking over plans.
He rightly decided that they had recalled sending the caretaker on a foolish errand. They must get back and make some explanation or he would suspect them, perhaps report to somebody else. They could not know that he was shivering, crouched down in the last place of Jeff’s own airplane.
Now for a race, Larry muttered, almost automatically moving the throttle wider as he prepared to alter their course.
It came to him, swiftly, that this would be both a race and a complication.
Not only must they get the airplane back to the golf course and set it down and have its engine still, themselves being hidden before Jeff flew over it. Furthermore, they must get to the hangar and be somewhere near the field when Jeff brought home the amphibian—or they would never know whether he and his companion had found anything or not.
Larry had to do a little rapid mental arithmetic.
To avoid being sighted and identified when passing the amphibian, the airplane must cut inland instead of making a beeline for the golf course.
“That would make the return to their objective form a rough letter “L” in the air.
However, at the far end of its flight the amphibian must turn inland a similar distance to fly over the golf fairway. That made the flying problem one of speed and not of distance traveled.
The airplane, selected for its wing-camber and span that gave it a low landing speed and good sustentation, was not fast.
The amphibian was even more slow.
“Distance to cover, seventy miles,” Larry pondered. “Our best speed, Jeff said, once, was about seventy miles an hour. The ‘phib’ does sixty, top.”
He made his calculation.
“No leeway to get to the hangar—Sandy might, barely, because he was on the track team, last school term. That is our only chance. But, at that, it will be ‘nip-and-tuck’!”
No air race can give the thrill of other forms of speed competition as does the horse race, the motor boat or sailing race, the track meet or the automobile speedway contests.
The distance is too great to permit spectators to observe it, the ships scatter, seek different elevations, or in other ways fail to keep that close formation which makes of the hundred-yard dash such a blood-stimulating incident.
The automobile contest generally follows a course where watchers have vantage points for gathering.
The sailboats or motor craft can be accompanied or seen through marine glasses.
To air pilots, of course, there is plenty of excitement.
It is their skill, their ability to take advantage of every bit of tailwind, their power to get the utmost of safe “go” out of engine, wings and tail assembly, that keeps them alert and decides the outcome.
So it was in Larry’s race, with Dick, Sandy and the caretaker.
It could not be watched or followed; but to the occupants of the ship it was a thrilling competition with the mystery element adding zest; and when, with a fair tailwind aiding him, Larry shot the improvised “field” of the ninth fairway, making sure at cost of one complete circuit that no one was there, playing, the thrill for them was not over.
Sandy caught Larry’s idea even before the airplane had taxied to its place, close to the original take-off.
“I’m off!” cried Sandy, coat flung aside, collar ripped away, as he leaped fleetly along the soft turf. Not waiting to observe his progress, Dick and Larry busied themselves getting the airplane tail around into the same position it had originally occupied.
The engine had long before been stopped.
From the air, to an observer who had no idea that his craft had been used, all should seem natural, Larry decided as he and Dick, with Sandy’s discarded garments, and with the caretaker ruefully grumbling, chose a place of concealment.
Already the drone of the amphibian came from the shore side of the field, and in a low, quick swing, followed by a zooming departure, Jeff and Mr. Whiteside passed overhead.
“Now,” Larry remarked, “it’s up to Sandy.”
“Yep!” Dick agreed. “And it will be a close thing for him.”
“If he does!” grunted the caretaker.
For the answer they had to wait till dark.
Although he was the central figure in an unusual situation, Sandy was more puzzled than enlightened by its surprising development.
A footrace against a flying ship was novel enough; but the maneuver of the amphibian was still more strange. It was baffling to Sandy.
Sandy gave up the race very quickly.
Hearing the approach of an aircraft he sought concealment under roadside trees, continuing his steady trot. His heart sank as he identified the amphibian making its swinging oval from water to land and around the fairway and back.
“I can’t make it,” Sandy slowed. “It’s all off!”
He knew that it was safe for him to leave his shelter. The “phib” was past him in its zooming return from the golf course.
“Now we’ll never know what they found, or if they found anything in the swamp,” he told himself dejectedly.
Then his attention was fixed and his mind became mystified.
“That’s their crate, all righty,” he muttered. “But—they’re not landing on the estate. I suppose they’ve come to see that Jeff’s ’plane was safe. Now they’ll go on to Connecticut and we are defeated.”
He came out onto the road, walking with bent head as soon as he had caught his breath again.
For a moody few minutes he considered the wisdom of rejoining his chums.
“No,” he decided. “When I don’t join them they’ll come over to the estate. It might be a good idea to go on to the landing field and see if the amphibian dropped off anything with a small parachute.”
He pursued his way without haste. While he had been divesting himself of his coat Larry had urged the caretaker to go on to his duties.
“I’ll go on!” Sandy murmured more cheerfully. “I’ll have a clear half hour to myself. Maybe—without anybody talking and disturbing me—I might think out some answer to all the queer things that have happened.”
The failure of the amphibian to return to its home field he disposed of by deciding that its pilot meant to take something to some rendezvous in Connecticut, the one, no doubt, the hydroplane boat had made for.
The thing that came into his mind and stuck there, offering neither explanations nor a solution was the mystery of how that man had disappeared out of the hangar on their first visit.
“I’d like to find out how the ‘ghost’ gets in and out again,” he reflected.
Deep in the problem he looked up at a sound.
To his surprise, astonishing him so much that he stopped in the middle of a stride, the lodgekeeper’s gate of an estate he was passing opened suddenly and Sandy found himself staring at the last person in the world he expected to meet.
Facing him with a grin was Jeff!
“Hello, buddy,” the pilot said, without any show of dismay.
“Why—uh—hello, Jeff!”
“On your way to solve that-there spook business?”
“I—” Sandy made up his mind to see if he could startle Jeff into a change of expression and changed his stammering indecision into a cool retort:
“I—met the estate caretaker in the village. He asked me to run on ahead and tell you—and Mr. Whiteside—” Sandy watched, “—he could not find a Six-B slotted bolt anywhere!”
“Oh, couldn’t he?”
Jeff did not change a muscle of his face.
“Sorry he had all the trouble. We got the ‘phib’ engine going and I took Whiteside off on a little private matter in that.”
“Have you brought him back?”
“No. Set down in the little inlet, yonder.” He waved toward the shoreline concealed beyond the estate shrubbery. “It was closer to my own crate—it’s stalled yonder in the golf course.”
“Oh!”
Yes—stalled! Sandy repressed a taunt and pretended to accept the false statement.
“I hear Larry’s been getting instruction off that-there Tom Larsen,” Jeff turned suddenly on Sandy.
“Yes. Mr. Whiteside paid for it.”
It would do no harm, Sandy thought, to let Jeff know that his fellow conspirator, if that was Mr. Whiteside’s real standing, was not playing fair. “When people who may be wicked turn against each other, we learn a lot,” Sandy decided.
He failed in his purpose.
“Tommy’s a good pilot,” Jeff admitted. “Well—I’ll be on my way. See you at the next air Derby!” Jeff grinned at his joke and walked on.
So did Sandy.
While he hurried on, pausing only to collect a “wienie” and roll for lunch, Larry and Dick saw Jeff approach across the green of the fairway and took cover.
“He’s inspecting that airplane—I hope we didn’t leave any clues!” whispered Dick.
“He’s feeling the engine cowling—he wonders how the motor stayed so warm,” Larry retorted under his breath. “Now he’s looking around—get down low, Dick—well, he’s shaking his head. Now he’s in the cockpit. There! He caught the spark on a compression stroke—used his ‘booster magneto.’ There goes the engine.”
And, from the descent of Jeff, to give the ground careful inspection to the moment when he gave up his own baffling puzzle and took off, the youthful amateur pilot reported to Dick, from a spy-hole in the greenery.
“I wonder if Sandy knows Jeff has come on to take his airplane off,” Dick mused.
“It’s safe to go and see. If Mr. Whiteside is on the estate it will look as though we came out extra early. Besides, I’m hungrier than Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Come on!” Larry led the way from the golf course as he spoke.
Sandy, long since safe at the hangar, began to work out his puzzle.
“Somebody was in this hangar the day Jeff made his pretended forced landing,” he told himself. “We saw him. It wasn’t a mistake. We all saw him and that proves he wasn’t just a trick of light in the hangar.”
More than that, he deduced, the man had vanished and yet, after he was gone, there had come that unexpected descent of the rolling door which had first made them think themselves trapped. Sandy argued, and with good common sense, that a ghost, in broad sunny daylight, was a silly way to account for the man. He also felt that it was equally unjust to credit the drop of the door to gravity. Friction drums are not designed to allow the ropes on them to slip, especially if there is no jolt or jar to shake them.
“But the switches that control the motor for the drum are right out on the wall in plain sight,” he told himself, moving over toward them, since the rolling door was left wide open when the amphibian was taken out. “Yes, here they all are—this one up for lifting the door, and down to drop it. And that switch was in the neutral—‘off’—position when we were first here—and it’s in neutral now.”
He tapped the metal with the rubber end of his fountain pan and then shook its vulcanite grip-handle, to see if jarring it caused any possible particles of wire or of metal to make a contact.
“That’s not the way it’s done,” he decided.
He stood before the small switch panel, considering the problem.
His eyes, in that position, were almost on a level with the pole-pieces to which wires were joined to enable the switch metal, when thrust between the flat pole contacts, to make contact and complete the electrical circuit.
“Hm-m-m-m!” Sandy emitted a long, reflective exclamation.
“I never saw double wires—and twisted around each other, at that,” he remarked under his breath. “No—I’m not quite right. The two wires aren’t twisted around each other. One wire is twined around the other.”
He traced the wires down into the metal, asbestos-lined sheathing cable, and was still not enlightened about the discovery. It was not necessary to have two wires. One was heavy enough for the hundred-and-ten volt current that came in from the mains.
“That wire, being twined around the other, makes me think it was added—after the first one was put in,” he declared.
“I wish I could trace it,” he added.
He tried.
Sandy, when he turned around, ten minutes later, knew all that the inside of the haunted hangar could reveal.
Another five minutes, concentrated close to a certain spot on the outside of the building, gave him his final clue.
But instead of waiting to tell his chums his great discovery, instead of keeping vigil, Sandy went away from there as fast as he could walk.
All afternoon he was as busy as a boy trying to keep ten tops spinning!
Never was a returning prodigal greeted with more delight than was Sandy when, close to dusk, with a parcel under his arm, he joined Dick and Larry inside a little Summer house in the Everdail estate grove.
“Where have you been?” demanded Larry. “We hunted high and low! We thought something had happened to you when we saw Jeff fly his airplane away, came here and didn’t locate you.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you. But I’ve been awfully busy.”
“Doing what, Sandy?”
“Following farmer boys down hot, sunny furrows while they picked vegetables for market, Dick.”
“Following farmer boys? What in the world for?”
“To ask them if their fathers would buy a book on family crests and have their coat of arms thrown in free.”
“Have you lost your head, Sandy?”
The youngest Sky Patrol grinned, and shook his head in question.
“No, Larry. It was an excuse to get them talking. I got the book out of Mr. Everdail’s library and used it to make them think I was a subscription agent—so I could ask questions.”
“Ask—questions?”
Dick and Larry spoke together.
“About what?” demanded Larry, and Dick nodded to show he wanted an answer also.
“Well—about who is related to who, and family scandals, and who works for this one and that one—just ‘gossip’.”
Dick caught the impish youth by his shoulders and shook him.
“Stop that! Tell us where you’ve been and what you did? We’ve worried ourselves sick, nearly.”
“I have told you.”
Then he became really serious.
He had been all over that section of the farm-lands, he asserted, to see if he could pick up any information that would give him some connection between either Mr. Whiteside or Jeff, or the mysterious seaplane passenger—and Mimi or the yacht stewardess.
“If I knew that, I thought we could start patching clues together,” he finished. “Because Jeff has a lot to do with this mystery.”
“I think you’re right,” Dick agreed. “But what started you off on that track?”
Taking an arm of each, Sandy led them, wordless, up the path.
Spying carefully to be sure that Mr. Whiteside was not in sight, and being certain that no one else was watching, Sandy led his chums into the hangar.
Across to one of its longer sides he led them.
“These are the switches that work the rolling door motor, you remember?”
“Yes, Sandy. What?——”
“Look at them before it gets too dark, Dick. Do you see anything strange? You know as much about wiring circuits as I do. We both built amateur short-wave sending and receiving sets. You, too, Larry. What isn’t right about the switches or—the wires?”
Thus guided, both studied the switches.
All Larry saw was that the wires were of a braided form.
“But—are they?” He pulled a wire out a trifle from the sheath.
Then his comrades observed what had first attracted Sandy’s attention, puzzled him and led to further search.
One wire, somewhat lighter in its insulation than the other, was wound around the heavier one. They traced it, as Sandy had done. It seemed to wind on down, as did others he showed, from each switch-pole, into the protective sheathing of metal and insulation; but none really were wound any further. From there on down, they ran behind the other wires!
“Bend down, close to the floor,” urged Sandy. “See all the dust and lint piled up?” He scraped some aside.
“My!” exclaimed Larry. “Golly-gracious-gosh-gravy-granny! The wires come out from behind the sheath and turn along the floor, close to the wall—and there’s dust all covering them! No wonder we didn’t notice them.”
“Where do they lead to?”
“Follow the dust line, Dick,” Sandy urged.
Back along the hangar wall they crept, until they came up to the small wooden cupboard with its dusty, frayed protecting burlap across the front. Under the cupboard boards the wires ran well concealed by more dusty lint which seemed to have been swept into the corners by the lazy act of some cleaner.
“Inside here—but don’t use a light—inside here, there are smaller duplicate switches for the electric light arc and the motors,” Sandy informed his breathless, admiring cronies.
They easily proved it. More, they located the wiring in the dusk.
“But how does Jeff get in and out of here?” asked Dick.
“We have to go outside so I can show you what I discovered.”
Trooping around to the rear, at one corner, Sandy bade them bend down and examine the bolted metal sheaths, large plates of sheet iron, that composed the walls of the edifice.
“I don’t see anything,” objected Dick, dejected that he had not been as quick of wit as had his younger chum. “But, then, you saw it first by daylight.”
“I did, that’s so.” Sandy gave them all the information he had. “I saw a break in the paint, only up one-half of this big plate of iron.
“The bottom half pushed inward,” he explained. “It has hinges fixed to the inner part so it will lift up into the hangar and we can creep in.”
He proved it, and they followed him through the fairly low orifice.
“Now,” he said, as Dick, last to crawl in, cleared the edge of the metal, “see how clever this is—the inside of the two plates it has to come down against are fixed with something soft—I think it’s felt—to keep the plate from clanging. It fits so well that the only way I found out about it was by the sun making the dent in the paint show up a few little bright worn spots of bare metal.”
They complimented him with no trace of envy.
“Do you think Jeff did this?”
“Well, Larry, he said he flew over here at night. He chews gum and we saw how fast he chewed the day he pretended to be forced to land here. He knew all about the emeralds. And the most telling thing against him is that his wife—Mimi—is Mrs. Everdail’s maid and was on the yacht——”
“Mimi his wife?”
Sandy nodded at Dick’s exclamation.
“Miss Serena saw her run in her uniform,” contributed Larry.
“How did you discover she was Jeff’s wife?”
“Talking to farmer boys—what they didn’t know, they found out from their older sisters when any of them were picking up early potatoes or snipping asparagus or digging up onions.”
“My—golly—gosh—gracious——”
Sandy agreed with Larry’s exclamations but urged his chums to leave the hangar: they knew all it could tell them. He wanted to replace the book he had used and get away from the hangar for awhile.
In the old, disused house, to which Mr. Whiteside had secured a set of keys for them so they need not hang around the grounds until there was work to be done, they talked in low tones. Sandy believed that Jeff had coaxed his wife to put acid on the gems in the London hotel, as had been done.
“He might be as much of a fanatic as that,” admitted Larry, but not with any great delight—he had always liked Jeff. “He is as superstitious as a heathen.”
“But the maid knew those weren’t the real gems!” Dick remarked.
“How do we know she did?”
“That’s so. But somebody said she did, or thought she must know the real ones.”
“That doesn’t prove she did, Dick. The real ones were hardly ever removed from safe deposit,” Sandy argued.
“Then why did she throw over that life preserver?—” and as he began the inquiry Larry saw the answer.
“She—saw—the—captain hide—the real gems!” he finished.
“Jeff didn’t use the amphibian, though. And he brought us here and induced us to aid him, saying we were helping Mr. Everdail.”
“Yes,” Dick supplemented Larry’s new point. “Another thing, Sandy, that doesn’t explain why he’d take three boys and fly a ship he could never use on water—with an amphibian right here.”
“I am only saying what I believe. I don’t know very much. But what I do know points to Jeff.”
“But he didn’t get the life preserver.”
No, Sandy agreed, Jeff did not expect to do that. He argued that Jeff must have planned to superintend the affair, while the man in the seaplane with Tommy Larsen secured the gems, whereupon Jeff could chase him, probably turn on him and get the emeralds, and then pretend on his return that the man had gotten safely away.
“But we don’t need to guess,” Sandy said. “Before I began asking questions I met Jeff on the way here.” He explained what made him suspect the man who said he must repair his “stalled” engine with a bolt that he knew was not made—a slotted bolt. “I slipped down across that estate to the inlet and saw the amphibian. And Mr. Whiteside was in it, supervising the filling of its tank!”
“Then he means to get away with Jeff——”
“No he doesn’t!” said Larry, sharply. “Here he comes onto the lawn!”
Pretending to be unaware of the arrival, the Sky Patrol issued from the house.
They saw that Mr. Whiteside carried a life preserver. In black on its side was painted “Tramp, New York.”
“Well, Sky Patrol—and Ground Crew,” he hailed them. “We are going to see some excitement at last!”
“Why?” asked Larry.
“How?” Dick amended.
“We are going to trap the real culprit.”
“How?”
“By watching in and around the hangar to-night—and this time our bait will be this life preserver that I discovered in the swamp. I guessed the ‘ghost’ was searching the amphibian and the seaplane for the right life preserver. I devised a plan to get rid of the caretaker while Jeff and I made a complete, exhaustive search, this noon. We found nothing; so Jeff flew me over the swamp and we got—this.”
“Let’s open it!” urged Sandy, all his former suspicions gone in his eagerness. “We can take out the emeralds and then put the empty doughnut in place.”
“No. We won’t tamper with it. I want to deliver it, intact, to Atley Everdail. His is the right to open it.”
“Isn’t it a risk?” Sandy objected.
“No. Dick will watch inside the hangar, Larry and I by the doors. Sandy will be in or near the amphibian. If Jeff is the culprit we’ll soon know—if he had a confederate we will discover that, perhaps, also.”
“If it isn’t Jeff at all—and I hope it won’t be,” Larry said, “if it turns out to be the seaplane passenger who discovered that in his terror he chute-jumped with the wrong belt, and he comes to hunt the right one——”
“Or if it is Captain Parks, or his mate, or a seaman—” Mr. Whiteside began to chuckle as he led them toward the dark loom of the hangar, “Or—even if it turns out to be—me!—”
“Did you walk under a ladder, today, sir?” asked Sandy seriously.
“No. Why?” The man stared at him through the night. “What makes you ask?”
“Because Jeff did—he walked under a ladder where a man was pruning a tree as he came to the gate of the estate next door.”
“Hm! Then—if he’s as superstitious as he makes believe,” Larry laughed, “he’d better watch out.”
“He had that!” Sandy agreed.
And Dick, as they entered the hangar, rolled down the doors, set the switch at neutral and he was alone with Sandy in the pitchy blackness, echoed the sentiment.
A new idea flashed into Sandy’s mind.
“Do you know,” he spoke through the darkness. “Dick, we’re not watching that amphibian at all! If Jeff did come here and managed to get away, he’d go straight there and fly off.”
Dick agreed, declared that with Larry and Mr. Whiteside within call he dared to wait in the hangar alone, and Sandy, going out through the secret way, encountered Larry and the detective, consulted them, had their sanction for his idea and hurried off toward the next estate.
Thus divided up, the Sky Patrol spent dull hours waiting.
But patience is always rewarded!
Wearisome though his vigil was, Sandy made the best he could of it by going over all the events that had happened.
With his chums he had become friendly with Jeff at the newly opened municipal airport. Jeff had flown them to the old estate, pretended that his motor died, simulated a forced landing, then explained it all in a way that looked sincere enough at the time—but now!——
Jeff had been the one to accompany Larry to the wreck of the seaplane, and to bring the life preserver back, when he took Tommy Larsen to the emergency hospital.
One little thing bothered Sandy at that point in his musing: why had Jeff not made away with the life preserver at once?
“Oh, but he hadn’t seen his wife then,” he thought. “Mimi told him her news, about seeing the captain of the yacht hide the real jewels—and being an airman, he hadn’t known that all yacht equipment has its name painted on it in case of a wreck at sea.”
Skipping many other things that seemed to point out Jeff as the ringleader, deceiving his employer and war buddy, Mr. Everdail, Sandy came down to the present suspicious circumstance.
“Jeff left the amphibian here on purpose. Of course he knows that Mr. Whiteside won’t leave the real jewel ‘preserver’ unguarded here, but he must know the plan to have it in the hangar. He thinks he is clever enough to outwit us all—but Jeff,” he addressed the imaginary image of the pilot, “you walked under a ladder, today. Don’t forget how superstitious you are. And—this time—it is an omen, and no mistake.”
He cut short his meditation and listened to the sound of oars in the inlet.
Was Mr. Whiteside coming—or Jeff?
His uncertainty was not maintained for long.
Making no effort to be quiet, the oarsman sculled to one of the steps arranged for embarking on the amphibian in water, looped a line around a strut to hold his boat against the drift of slack tide and a slight wind, and came onto the amphibian.
Sandy, crouched low in the passenger’s cockpit, hoping Jeff would not notice him, was dazzled by the beam of a searchlight pocket lamp which Jeff flashed around.
“Hello!” he exclaimed, surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“Don’t you know the plan?” Sandy wanted to take advantage of Jeff’s momentary indecision: perhaps he would “give away” something.
“Yeah! I know what Whiteside planned. But he didn’t plan for anybody to be here. What’s the need?”
“In case the—ghost—got away from the others and knew this airplane was here.”
Sandy got a shock of surprise.
“Why, that-there is so! And if the gas-boat come and filled up the tank—I sent it, this afternoon and that was what Whiteside stayed here for, to see that the ‘phib’ got gassed and oiled up—the—ghost—could use it, if that-there ghost was a pilot.”
“That’s what we thought.”
Jeff chuckled rather sourly.
“Yes,” he said. “And you suspect me. I know you have, ever since the start of this business——”
“Oh, yes—I did.” Sandy thought fast: he decided to clear Jeff’s mind. “But don’t you remember that I turned over a new leaf?”
“I wish your buddies and that-there Whiteside would do as much, then.”
Sandy could not find anything to say.
“It’s funny,” Jeff remarked. “This-here psychology I’ve read about ain’t so far wrong when it says that folks who gets the wrong slant on a thing comes to believe it so strong that even the truth looks like a fib to them.”
Sandy said nothing.
“Oh, well,” Jeff turned and found his way back to the rowboat. “Time will tell. I seen a flock of birds circle over my head this afternoon and that-there is a sure sign of good fortune. I’ll come out cleared!”
With no further word he sculled away.
“Don’t forget,” he called over his shoulder, “if you can suspect me, I can suspect you—and Whiteside—and Dick—and Larry!”
Sandy, without reply, was already quietly undressing.
When the boat touched the wharf Sandy was a tiny figure moving with careful strokes through the water, screened by the amphibian as he swam for a sandy outcrop of the shore not far beyond the flying craft.
The dark figure of the pilot, moving across the estate shore paths had, at a good distance behind it, a shadow. Sandy had managed to hold his bundled clothes enough out of water to be fairly dry.
Over to the disused estate the quarry and its watchful shadow moved.
The pilot turned up a slope and climbed the smooth turf.
Sandy, waiting until he got to a shrubbery, moved so it was between him and his quarry. He, too, crossed the ascending turf.
It startled Sandy to see Jeff turn in at the old house, climb the veranda steps, cross the porch to the door—and go in.
Sandy stayed behind some shrubbery.
Jeff could watch from the doorway. He might see a figure in the open space of the lawn around the house.
He thought he guessed Jeff’s ruse.
The pilot, he reasoned, would go through the house after seeing that no one seemed to be following; but to be doubly sure he would go on to the front, coming out there, or to the side opposite where he had entered. Sandy matched his plans to the chance. He went, Indian-still and crouched, to a point where an ornamental tree would be in line with his movement from the side door, then in that shelter moved back to the hedged path, bent low and ran down to a cross path that took him to another point of the grounds.
From that he could observe the whole lawn around the house.
But, when a half hour had elapsed and no one had come out, he was puzzled. Had his maneuver been executed too late? No, Jeff could not have gotten out of sight because the lawn was too wide to cross in the brief time Sandy used up.
“He’s in the house—doing what?” he wondered.
He did not dare to find out. That “what” might be answered by “watching!”
Once he thought he caught a glint of light in the library window; but it could have come from a high beam of some automobile headlight, on the distant highway that passed the estate.
So Sandy watched and waited.
Therefore he did not see the dark figure that emerged cautiously from the grove and, with intent, careful gaze, studied the hangar.
The ghost was getting ready to walk!
When Dick had tried crouching, sitting on his heels, walking and every other device he could think of to end the interminable difficulties of trying to pass time with nothing to do and nothing under him but the hard cement hangar floor, he began to wish he had never met Jeff or gotten into the adventure at all.
He resolved, then and there, never to become a detective.
Countless times his nerves had been pulled by sounds which turned out on second thought to be only the contracting of the hot metal, subjected to the sun all day, as the evening breeze robbed it of its warmth.
No wonder that he failed to react to a slight clinking, hardly more than would be made by the scratch of wire in a lock.
But the shrinking of metal had made intermittent noises, sharp and not repeated.
This sound, so insistent, so prolonged, began, at last, to make an impression. “Now what can that be?” he wondered, becoming strained in his effort to make his ears serve him to the fullest degree.
“It can’t be a rat’s claws,” he decided. “There aren’t any rats. There’s nothing to draw them, here.”
At the emission of a sharper click from some unlocated point he felt his spine chill, his nerves grew tense and a queer, uneasy feeling ran over his muscles, an involuntary tremble.
“What could make such a sound?” he pondered.
Then he drew his legs in under him as he sat with his back against the metal sheathing of a corner.
The small, side door, toward the Sound shore, was opening!
That was a complication for which nothing had been planned. Larry and Mr. Whiteside, Dick knew, were lying in the shadow of the hedge behind the hangar, watching the cleverly devised back entry way.
Because it had been supposed that the “ghost”—Jeff—or whoever it was, would use that means of getting in, Dick’s own position had been chosen. He had selected a place sharply diagonal in direction from it. In his corner he could not be seen in the beam of a flashlight from the small cupboard unless its user came all the way out: otherwise the sides would shape the path of the light so it would not come near him.
But a man or ghost entering from the side, and playing any light around, would show Dick fully exposed.
The worst of that was that there was no rear guard flanking that door!
“Well,” Dick thought. “I can only wait and see what happens—and be ready to chase if I am discovered. Maybe I can catch and hold the ‘ghost’ till the others get to us.”
Careful not to scrape his soles in the cement, he gathered himself into a crouching, compact, alert figure.
Dim and hardly distinct to his straining eyes, there seemed to be in the slightly lighter gloom of the floor where the door opened, a shadow.
It might be an illusion of his taut nerves and tense mind, Dick decided.
He could not see out through the opening because he was almost in a straight line with the wall on that side.
He waited, becoming shaky with the strain, for what seemed like a dragging eternity.
The intruder must be scanning the landscape, judging conditions, he guessed.
When it seemed that he could not stay as he was another instant, the door was slightly moved, and then softly closed. So quiet was the operation that he did not hear the latch click. He had detected no change in the color of the door itself as it hung, slantwise to his view, and he heard no sound of feet on the cement.
That meant nothing fearful or horrifying to Dick.
Rubber soles and a dark suit covered the logical explanation.
“Still, I should have seen his face—maybe a mask, though——”
At any rate, he knew that he was not alone inside the edifice, and if Dick’s common sense was too great to let him think of uncanny spirits, the sense of danger supplied chills and thrills a-plenty.
A faint, glowing, bluish light broke out.
It threw no beam, only a sort of dull phosphorescence; but Dick’s quick eyes ran instantly to its source—some small flashlamp covered with colored cloth, a handkerchief, perhaps.
Behind that silhouette, because the light was aimed in the direction away from Dick, he saw what caused him to emit a revealing gasp.
The figure silhouette between him and the glow wore a dress!
“A woman!” gasped Dick, and at the same instant the figure whirled, Dick leaped up, the light went out and Dick rushed blindly forward.
A hand fumbled with the catch: that located her.
In his rush, Dick’s arms were carried around the shoulders he could not see. Like a serpent, sinuous, tense, powerful, the woman squirmed around in his arms.
He tried to hold her with one hand as he strove to open that door with the other, while he took the beating of her furious hands on his bent face.
The door catch yielded—their wrestling, struggling weight drew it inward.
“Help—this way!” screamed Dick.
And he clung like a terrier to a tigress!